by Lee Deadkeys
“Thank you, mighty kind of you,” Ox said.
Mr. Allen was looking at him curiously.
“What?” Ox asked.
Mr. Allen rubbed at the scruff on his chin. “What is it son? Something is troubling your calm,” he asked.
Ox saw the fatherly concern in the man’s kind, dark eyes and before he could stop himself, had blathered out all his concerns about his mother, the weird box, the rats and, to his horror, even ranted about the strange mole he’d discovered on the back of his leg.
Big Al nodded at all the appropriate places until Ox had finished his spiel. “Come here my boy,” he said, walking around the counter. Ox followed obediently. Mr. Allen browsed the large selection of ammunition stored on the shelves. “Son, you still have that beautiful Colt single action I sold you couple years ago?”
Ox was shocked at the man’s memory. “Uh, yes, sir, but I carry a Glock when I travel.” He felt like he should apologize for carrying what many old-timers considered gun-Tupperware, but before he could, Big Al moved from the boxes of .45LC to the boxes of .45 auto.
“Please God, at least tell me it’s in .45ACP,” he said with a wink.
“Oh, yes, sir, absolutely.”
“Thank the Lord. Now the universe can resume a somewhat normal course.” He pulled out two boxes of jacketed hollow points and handed them to Ox. “A gift. I don’t know about you, son, but I always feel better about life’s oddities when I’m loaded for bear, or rats, whatever the case may be.”
“I agree. I need a couple more magazines and throw in that owl beanie, too. I insist on paying for the mags and owl, though,” Ox said.
Mr. Allen punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I insist also,” he said and they both laughed.
“Earthquakes are here.” Ox heard from behind him and his laughter died in his throat. He turned slowly and saw Sheldon, standing there with a double-barreled shotgun leveled at his groin. Sheldon looked out the window. “Event’s started,” he mumbled.
Ox felt his skin crawl. “What earthquakes, Sheldon?” He asked, his mother’s voice echoing through his head.
“Sheldon, put that shotgun down this instant!” Mr. Allen yelled and took two steps toward Sheldon. “Are you out of your ever-lovin’-mind?”
Sheldon swung the barrels and pointed them square in the middle of Mr. Allen’s chest. Ox felt like he was trying to move through a vat of clear syrup. He reached to grab Mr. Allen’s arm, but his timing was off.
Mr. Allen reached for the gun, grabbed the barrels and tried to jerk it away. That was when Sheldon pulled both triggers.
Ox heard the blast a second before his brain registered the clicks of the firing pins striking nothing. Mr. Allen jerked the gun away and cracked it open. “Empty,” he said, and then leaned it behind the counter.
“He meant to kill you!” Ox said, barely able to restrain himself from beating Sheldon into an even more compact size.
With an all too steady hand, Mr. Allen reached out to Sheldon. To Ox he said, “Son, if he’d meant to kill me, I’d think he’d have loaded the gun.” He turned and faced Sheldon again, “Why did you do that, Sheldon? Haven’t I told you, you are never to touch the weapons?”
“Blacks and greens,” Sheldon replied, the muscles around his eyes pinching a bit as if he was trying to focus on something the rest of them couldn’t see.
“What, Sheldon?” asked Mr. Allen.
“That’s all the colors left. Earthquakes took em. Event’s started.”
Ox shook his head; it was like asking a bear why it ripped some hippie-hiker’s scalp off or why a dog sometimes eats its own shit. Why ask why?
Sheldon looked out the window, shrugged and walked out the door. “Did you hear the way he says earthquake? Mrs. Allen commented on how cute that was a couple days ago when he started talking about them,”
Mr. Allen chuckled. Ox did not. None of this was funny to him. Suddenly he wanted to be home with his mother. Something tugged at him, urged him to leave quickly, told him that he should have never left his mother and that it was probably already too late.
“I have to go. Give my apologies to the Mrs.” He turned before he passed through the door adding, “It was really good seeing you again, Mr. Allen. I’ll be back when I can.”
Mr. Allen waved, “Godspeed, my son.”
God speed is right, he thought and left for home.
Day 5, Afternoon
Frank, Mason and Jess
Downtown Phoenix
Mason maneuvered the truck through near-stalled traffic as Frank tore open the glove box and began riffling through it. Fuses, receipts and old maps were jettisoned to the floor of the truck. Frank grabbed the bandana from the back of the glove box, popped it open and turned to Jess. It seemed to him that there was an awful lot of blood, but then any amount of blood when it’s covering your child would seem like a lot. Taking her injured arm as gently as he could, he wrapped it with the bandana and then knotted it tightly.
Jess didn’t seem to notice any of this, if fact, she seemed vacant, hollow. Frank looked carefully at her, even giving her injured arm a slight squeeze and hoping for her to cuss him for it. Jess continued to stare directly ahead, frozen, just like Dick and Delilah before they turned violent. A terrible thought occurred to him. She has it, whatever it is. Oh, God! Maybe it’s transferred through the blood!
Jess came alive with a sudden jerk, her hands clawing at her face and hair. Frank grabbed her arms and shook her violently.
“Stop it, Jess!” Mason yelled, letting go of the wheel briefly to help.
“Get it off, get it off!” She screamed. “It’s all over me, get it off!” Frank felt a moment of relief before one of her hands broke free, scratching a decent gouge under her eye.
Frank slapped her. She blinked once and snapped her head toward him.
“You hit me.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“This stuff is all over me,” she sobbed and Frank, near tears himself, felt his heart break.
“Just sit tight, Honey, I’ll get you cleaned up.” He glanced around the cab, found nothing and finally stripped off his top shirt. The gore covering her from the shoulders up had already begun to congeal, making cleanup even more difficult. He started delicately at first, but after a moment he gave up and began dry-scrubbing her face. The hair was a lost cause, as was her shirt.
Mason laid a hand on her knee, giving it a slight squeeze. “You OK, Baby?”
“Yes… No. I don’t know if I’m… Mason lookout!”
Mason snapped his head forward. Two people ran across the street, chased by a naked teenage boy that could have been a linebacker. Part of the boy’s scalp flapped against his Neanderthal-sized neck.
The truck went into a skid as Mason stood on the brake, tires screeching and coughing out black smoke. The linebacker alerted on the sound and, without missing a step, turned and hurled himself at the truck. There was a sickening thud as the slowing truck passed over his body and finally came to rest sideways in the middle of the road.
The boy’s arms drummed on the asphalt a few times before he was able to turn himself over. Frank saw that some of the boy’s intestine had been forced out his rectum and he tried to cover Jess’s eyes. She threw his hand away, “Dad, I’m wearing someone else’s brains… it’s too late for that.”
Frank watched as the linebacker made a few backstroke motions on the hot asphalt and then stilled. Almost instantly he saw a cloud of the same greenish-black stuff that had haloed Dick and his secretary’s head ooze from each of the boy’s orifices. It smoldered up and out, blanketing the body in a sickly mantle. It hung there for a few moments and then twitched. Frank wondered if the boy was still alive, his movements disturbing the heavy vapor. Frank pondered this as it began to twist at the center, like a birthing tornado.
Ripples formed near the edges as the gaseous shroud began to condense and collapse, solidifying into a puddle of tar-like goo. Frank was tempted to get out for a closer look. He wondered
if it was some kind of advanced bio-weapon that changed from a gas to a, more or less, liquid form.
“I think it’s dead,” he said aloud.
Mason looked at Frank. “Yeah, getting run over tends to do that to people.”
Frank gave him a patient look, “Not the lad, the stuff that came out of him… the black cloudy stuff.”
Mason looked back to the boy. This is all too much, he thought, but said, “You think it’s alive?”
Frank shrugged, “I don’t know what I think, but that lad lying dead over there was behaving just like Dick and that woman. Something is seriously wrong here.”
“We need to call the police, Frank. Get some help over here,” Mason trailed off.
Frank nodded and snatched his cell from his belt, dialed 911 and hit send. Before he got the phone to his ear, he could hear a loud, pulsing distortion. Gritting his teeth, he placed the phone to his ear. Through the nerve-grating noise, he thought he heard a faint, feminine voice saying that all circuits were busy. He ended the call and turned to Mason, “Well, 911 is out. No Calvary to this rescue.”
An engine roared behind them, followed by a terrified scream. They all turned to look. An elderly man was viciously yanking a woman in a compact car by the arm. They could see the expression of outright horror on the woman’s face as she hit the gas again.
The engine revved but the car didn’t move an inch. Mason opened his door and was partially out of the truck when the woman suddenly stopped screaming, looked down at something they couldn’t see and frantically moved her hand from the wheel. The engine revved again, and this time the little car lurched forward, dragging the elderly man alongside. She did all right until realizing that the cars in front of her weren’t moving.
Frank watched as she tried desperately to steer around them, clipped the fender of one and headed straight for them. Mason jumped back into the truck just as the woman made eye contact with him. She panicked, overcorrected and slammed into the back of a minivan.
Her head hit the steering wheel and snapped back. No airbag? Frank wondered dazedly. He sat up in the cab, looking for the old man, not out of concern for his physical welfare, but in hopes that the man was now a smear on the side of the van.
Just like a creepy Jack-in-the-box from hell, the old man popped up from in between the two wrecked vehicles. The stunned woman screamed and tried to reverse, hitting yet another abandoned vehicle before coming to a stop.
“I gotta do something,” Mason said and jumped from the vehicle. He made it a few steps before the old man pulled himself level with the open window of the woman’s car. Mason stopped in mid-jog when he saw that the previous impact had almost cut the man in half.
The woman feebly batted at the old man’s head while crying No! No! No! over and over. The man’s grip on the window frame started to slip and Mason dared to hope that the woman would come out of this with only a sore neck and arm.
One of the man’s hands slipped and he sagged almost to the road, his body bent the wrong way, as though his spine were now a bendy-straw. The triumphant feeling dissolved as the man once again found purchase. He pulled himself level again and vomited a thick cloud into the woman’s face before dropping to the road.
The woman screamed and scratched at her face, then stopped abruptly. She began to shake violently back and forth in the seat, screamed once more and went at her face again with renewed vigor.
Someone screamed in one of the nearby vehicles. It took Mason a moment to realize it was Jess. He looked back to the woman in the compact car. She used one hand to pull herself through the opening, the other continued to work on her face.
Mason turned and ran for the truck. “We’re heading to the police station. If they won’t come to us, we’ll go to them.”
Frank looked indecisive. “I don’t know, son, maybe the hospital would be a better option. We could get Jess looked at and maybe get some answers as to what we’re dealing with.”
“Phoenix Baptist,” Jess said, awakening from her stupor. “Angel is there.”
“Good idea,” Frank said. “Mason mentioned she was in the hospital but didn’t say why.”
Jess shook her head, trying to clear it. “She called this morning. There was a lot of noise on the line, I couldn’t hear her very well but I definitely heard her say she was at Phoenix Baptist.”
“We should head there, then,” Mason said as he began to gently back the truck up. “Your Dad is right, we need to get that arm looked at… and hopefully get some answers while we’re at it.”
Day 5,Afternoon
Sam and the Rookie
Phoenix Baptist Hospital
Sam Story dozed restlessly in one of the hospital’s designed-for-discomfort chairs, distractedly listening to the madness coming from the other rooms and corridors of Phoenix Baptist.
The other people barricaded in the Rookie’s room with him talked in hushed whispers as they tended to a woman’s bandana-tied arm. Sam felt a sense of pride that he could snooze, although fitfully, while the others jumped at every muffled scream and thud coming from the other side of the door. Civilians, he thought and chuckled in his half-slumber.
“Something about this funny?” The older guy asked, and Sam reluctantly opened his eyes.
“Not at all, pops. You people need to relax, maybe get some rest. You’re doing yourself no good this way, and besides, nothing is getting through that door.” Sam gestured to the two heavy hospital beds, minus the mattresses, that crisscrossed the door leading out to the hall.
The older guy looked to the door and huffed, “Fella, after what I’ve seen today, I wouldn’t bank on any absolutes.”
Irritated, Sam sat up in the chair, fully awake now. “Look pops, you people are free to leave this room and try your lot out there in Hell’s Hospital. Or, you can let me get some sleep so I can come up with an exit strategy.”
Sam sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “We can hold out here for a while in relative safety. We still have water and a few eats on that food cart I managed to grab from the hall when I met you all… running around like scared rabbits I might add.”
“We were on our way out of here,” the woman with the bad arm said defensively. “And now here we are, stuck with you like rabbits waiting for the axe.” Her green eyes flashed at Sam and he thought, get rid of the bitchiness and she’d be a real looker.
But like it or not, as far as he knew, these people were the only normal ones left in this whole jacked-up place. He stood and walked over to the small group of strangers. One of the men, the younger of the two, stood up, more like bristled up, he noted and stepped in front of the two women sprawled on the floor.
“Look,” Sam started. “Let’s not get off on the wrong foot here. We are all under considerable stress. Add injuries, fatigue and the fact that we are strangers to the equation and you have a recipe for disaster.”
“You two are the strangers here,” the green-eyed woman said, gesturing toward him and then the rookie.
“Sergeant Story is no stranger, ma’am,” Chad said from his hospital bed.
“Sergeant?” The older man said. He’d finished applying a fresh bandage to the woman’s arm and now he stood beside the younger one. “You in the military?”
Sam shook his head, “No, I’m… well, was, a guard at Wormwood Penn. There was an incident. I’m no longer employed there.”
“That’s when I got my fingers bit off,” Chad interrupted. “The Sarge here probably saved my life, and I know he tried to save my fingers, but the butthole inmate had chewed them too much….” Chad looked blankly at his bandaged hand. “I swear they’re still there… I can feel ‘em, Sarge.”
Sam looked away, uncomfortable. “Yeah, anyway, I’m Sam. This guy was my rookie, and his name’s Chad.”
The older guy seemed to relax some, “Well then, I’m Frank, Frank Walker. This is my daughter, Jessica, her boyfriend, Mason, and my daughter-in-law, Angel.” They all nodded to Sam as Frank listed off their names.
&nb
sp; “Well, I would say it’s nice to meet you all, but under the circumstances—” Sam stopped as a loud bang from the next room rattled the doors of a supply cabinet.
“Enough with the niceties,” Jess said. “Do you have any idea what’s going on here? We heard one of the doctors say something about a parasitic outbreak in the city. We tried to get more information but then shit went from bad to worse.” She ran a hand absently over her bandaged arm. “This has to have something to do with those damn boxes.” Her head snapped up and she looked directly at Sam. “Hey, have you seen any? Any strange box-type things in the hospital… or anywhere else? They’re big, coffin sized.”
The conversation with Ted popped into his head. There is this old chest down there. He thought Ted had been talking crazy, but now, as he thought back on it, Ted had said they found the chest under inmate 2012’s cell. The same cell the Doc was in moments before he decided to off himself via Bic ballpoint.
“Not me personally,” he managed, “but one of my former co-workers mentioned finding something that sounds like what you described.”
Frank looked to Mason, who nodded, go on. “Well, seems these things have been popping up all over the world for the past few days, from what the news people are saying. We found one in a storage unit a few days ago and tried to get it open.”
“We saw some on the news, too,” Jessica said. “The bomb squad tried to blow one up, but nothing happened. When the smoke cleared, the damned thing was still there, unmarked, like they’d tried to blow it up with Play-Doh instead of C-4.”
Frank took over seamlessly. “So, it seems these things are everywhere. There is even one over Jess’s apartment. When we found out about the others, we decided we didn’t want any more to do with them and went to collect our tools and equipment from the unit. Then, this morning, it opened.”
Sam blinked at him. “And? What was inside?” He had a bad feeling; did he really want to know what was inside? Part of him did, that was the damnable thing.